Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Robert Birgeneau Fails Upwards

Who would have guessed that the path to prominence
and high regard in the field of higher education could involve trashing the
values, dividing the community, and undermining the integrity of the world’s
finest higher education system?

Regular readers will be familiar with my
complaints about Birgeneau: his response to state disinvestment was
characterised by acquiescence to creeping privatisation; his response to other
members of our community who tried to speak out about the problem was
unconstructive; his repeated endorsement of police violence split the campus
community at a time when we needed unity; his calls for a divided,
market-driven University of California system in which the burden remained
squarely on the shoulders of students rather than the public were offensive to all
those who appreciate the value of a unified system and the shared community of
interests and ambitions such a community creates.In short, Birgeneau exemplifies how not to
lead a public institution of higher education at a time of crisis.

Birgeneau’s approach to the crisis of
California’s universities in the face of state disinvestment is to concede the
argument and to reconfigure funding, utterly transforming (and not for the
better) the relationship between the University, its students, and Californians.“I believe that state public education is too
important to be left to the state”, Birgeneau
said to the Daily Cal, which
cited his Middle Class Access Plan as evidence of his commitment to public
education.

Now some might say that Birgeneau was
simply making the best of a bad situation in attempting to make the process of
de facto privatisation gentler (because what else can we call the process of
transferring responsibility for the university’s funding from California’s
taxpayers to students and their families?).But if his tenure as Chancellor is anything to go by, Birgeneau isn’t
interested in protecting public higher education.He’s interested in managing public access to
what we might call, to adopt the Orwellian language of the managerial caste
which speaks with an increasingly assertive voice on our campuses, post-public
(to prevent the discomfort associated with the other p-word) universities in
the way least calculated to stir outrage amongst said public should they
realise that something which once belonged to them has been mismanaged and mutilated.Now that disfigurement, to be fair, occurred
in large measure because of the public’s own negligence, and that negligence
was due to a combination of general apathy and to the actions of specific,
ideologically-motivated interests.

California has grown increasingly
anti-communitarian, its citizens taking less and less account of how their actions
affect their neighbours, whether those neighbours are right next door or at the
other end of the state.We are less and
less attached to the idea that we share a responsibility to look after one
another and to create institutions which will serve successive generations of
Californians well.And for many years we
were victims of the Republican Party’s California Strategy, which involved
using the power unfairly conferred on them by the state’s undemocratic
supermajority rules to sabotage government and undermine trust in collective,
public institutions, and then run campaigns based on the fact that the
government they’d just sabotaged wasn’t performing very effectively.

Democrats, long sympathetic to the
University, now have supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate.However, thus far the situation has not
improved.Berkeley is getting a new
Chancellor who is resigned to the changed relation of the University to the
state.Disinvestment has been
temporarily checked, but there is no talk of increasing funding and reducing
the tuition burden.And the Governor is making
demands of the University which, this cynic thinks, have less to do with a
coherent view of the University of California and its mission to the public
than with political expediency and a desire to cut costs.Jerry Brown would have greater legitimacy in
trying to tell the University of California how to perform its teaching and
research duties if he brought state funding back to a level that made
California a seriously committed partner in our higher education sphere.

Only the Chancellor himself really knows
if he is personally committed to public higher education.The evidence I’ve seen suggests otherwise,
but irrespective of his intentions, he has repeatedly sent the message that institutions
like Berkeley can no longer afford to be public, and that he is interested in
taking us to that post-public world, charging higher tuition, offering more
marketable degrees, degrading the breadth of the education offered at Berkeley,
and happily leaving the rest of the system in the lurch.

For these reasons, he is not fit to
serve as an advocate for higher education in California.At least not for the version of higher
education that most members of the University community hold dear.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.